Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we

unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. Today is February 23rd.

My name is Alex and I'm joined today by the usual power trio. In one corner we have the Pride of Texas, it's Mary Ann As a Beto.

Mary Ann, hey.

Hi Alex, I can't help but chuckle at being called The Pride of Texas.

As I always tell you, you're my favorite Texan and therefore you're the best one.

We also have Kirsten Cora sec. Kirsten, how are you doing?

Great, um, great for me actually, Alex, but not so good if you're trying to sell premium

e.vies as you might have noticed with some of our coverage earlier this week

about Rivian and Lucid. Yeah we'll talk about more evies down the road but not the

four wheel variety instead we'll talk about more EVs down the road, but not the four wheel variety.

Instead, we'll talk about those that only have two on the show today.

We do have deals of the week from Permit Flow, Cake,

and then what Match Group is doing with Open AI.

And then for our first major section of the show today, we're going to discuss what happened

with Klarna and Sequoia, and then we're going to close with notes on venture-backed gaming and

why gaming companies could be in good straits for 2024.

But Marianne, you have put my most hated words into a headline, and so I want to start with

you because you put TurboTax into a startup headline and I want to know why.

Well, I was, I wrote an article about a company called Permit Flow,

and I guess you can tell from the headline,

they are focused on permitting, specifically construction permitting, and they claim to be building the turbo tax for construction permitting.

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